CHAN TING: DREAMSKIN

Each artwork begins as a process of conservation. Discarded vessels, containers and other objects—empty and in disrepair—are salvaged and brought back to the artist’s studio for restoration. Drawing on her background as a hypnotherapist and energy healer, Chan Ting then communes with these objects to fill their voids, adding layers of construction plaster and pigment that are gradually drilled, sanded, and polished with heavy industrial tools.

Chan Ting’s treatment of these fillings resembles the practices of ancient alchemy, which attempted to transform common materials into noble metals. Here, hardware store materials typically considered crude and cheap are burnished until glossy, evoking the museum sheen of oil paintings. This process transmutes the rejected or abandoned object, rendering an item of lost utilitarian use into an artwork of care and attention. Just as alchemists sought a cure for all diseases, perhaps Chan Ting’s meticulous transformations could be a response to societal malaise: the infinite pain of abandonment and rejection.

These filled in voids contribute to a mass of auriferous green surfaces across Chan Ting’s body of work, a multiplication process that the artist describes as similar to that of “human moss.” The artist’s use of the color green expresses growth and plant life, and the reference to moss—which notably grows in between cracks and crevices—a symbol of resilience in loss. Yet the green also represents the artist’s broader philosophical engagements in accumulations of time and collective memory. Across the space, a curiously recognizable dark green catches the viewer’s eye. Seen on Hong Kong’s trams and colonial style buildings and lampposts, the hue is the result of surplus paint produced for the military after the Second World War. Over time, it has become as much a part of the city’s landscape as the carpet of moss that forms over rocks and hilltops, pavements and roadsides.

What is lost when places and people evolve and adapt? What is left behind to gain new life? Around the individual artworks and found furnitures of “dreamskin,” a new sound, text, and video installation drifts in the space, permeating the air with murmurs of dreams, memories, staircases, lakes, and airplane flights at night. Reflecting on the transience of place that witness our minor, individual migrations—from a city worker moving apartments, to a student leaving home, or families moving across skies and seas—Chan Ting meditates on the multiplicity of life and offers up the radically hopeful perspective that what was once empty can be filled again.

For further information and media inquiries, please contact Neil Wong (neil@phdgroup.art). For sales inquiries, please contact Willem Molesworth (willem@phdgroup.art) or Ysabelle Cheung (ysabelle@phdgroup.art).